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The question of realism permeates audiovisual media at all levels.

Thanks to their photographic basis and unique combination of movement and time, they relate directly to and present a close resemblance with the phenomenological world. Even when resulting from animation or computer-generated images and sound, they can produce a 'reality effect' able to cause physical and emotional impact. Many film schools and movements, as well as genres such as the documentary, resort to realism as style, through which they aspire to reveal concealed or unknown dimensions of reality.

This book undertakes an in-depth investigation of these phenomena, querying their origins, relations, divergences and intersections from a variety of perspectives, drawing on world-renowned expertise in audiovisual theory and practice. Subjects covered include new developments in realist scholarship; new realisms in world cinema; realist schools and genres; sensation, the body and real sex in cinema; cinematic scale and the real; the production of reality and the ethics of representation in film and television.

A wide range of case studies survey past and current tendencies in Korean, Italian, German, Russian, Mexican, Brazilian, American, Taiwanese, French, Japanese and British film and television.

About the Author

Lucia Nagib is Professor of Film at the University of Reading. Her research has focused, among other subjects, on polycentric approaches to world cinema, new waves and new cinemas, cinematic realism and intermediality. Her single-authored books include World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (Continuum, 2011), Brazil on Screen : Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia (I.B. Tauris, 2007), The Brazilian Film Revival : Interviews with 90 Filmmakers of the 90s (Editora 34, 2002), Born of the Ashes : The Auteur and the Individual in Oshima's Films (Edusp, 1995), Around the Japanese Nouvelle Vague (Editora da Unicamp, 1993) and Werner Herzog : Film as Reality (EstacaoLiberdade, 1991).

'The issue of realism is a fundamental conceptual question for film as well as for audiovisual media in general, and this collection is a very major and timely contribution that re-assesses the impetus to realism in cinema and the form and style of realism in contemporary film in the context of the digital, of multi-platform viewing, and world cinema. The wide-ranging essays draw on classical film theory while developing new insights into and understanding of current cinema. I have no doubt that it will be required reading on many courses.' Elizabeth Cowie, University of Kent, UK 'Realism and the Audiovisual Media is an extremely topical collection of essays, one that will be most valuable to students and researchers in the field of media studies.' Martine Beugnet, University of Paris 7 Diderot, France

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction PART I: THEORIZING REALISM World Cinema: Realism, Evidence, Presence; T.Elsaesser Whither Realism? Bazin Reconsidered; L.Grist On Brecht, Realism and the Media; M.Silberman Melodrama as Realism in Italian Neorealism; L.Bayman Scale and the Negotiation of 'Real' and 'Unreal' Space in the Cinema; M.A.Doane PART II: WORLD CINEMA AND NEW REALISMS Realism and Gus Van Sant's Elephant; A.Rogers Observational Realism in Taiwan New Cinema; M-Y.T.Rawnsley Realism and National Identity in Y Tu Mama Tambien: An Audience Perspective; A.De La Garza A Journey through Time: Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark and Theories of Mimesis; V.Strukov PART III: THE REALISM OF THE MEDIUM Realism, Real Sex and Experimental Cinema: Mediating Eroticism in Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye; B.Johnson Breath Control: The Sound and Sight of Respiration as Hyper-Realist Corporeality in Breaking the Waves; D.Quinlivan Ontology, Film and the Case of Eric Rohmer; J.Leigh Up the Junction: Ken Loach and TV Realism; C.Mello PART IV: DOCUMENTARY, TV AND THE ETHICS OF REPRESENTATION Filmmaking as the Production of Reality - A Study of Hara and Kobayashi's Documentaries; L.Nagib Character Construction in Brazilian Documentary Films: Modern Cinema, Classical Narrative and Micro-Realism; I.Xavier The Difficulty with Documentary; J.M.Salles Losing Grip on Reality - A Reflection on British Factual Television; D.Myers Notes Bibliography Index